Hands-on with YouTube, labels’ music video lovechild, Vevo

The lovechild of YouTube and several major record labels has finally launched …

Vevo, the spinoff of YouTube meant for professional music videos, has finally launched—with the usual sputter that comes with highly-anticipated website debuts. The site, which has been in the works since at least March of this year, is aimed at allowing the major record labels to put their stuff online on their own sanitized part of YouTube, outside the user-generated YouTube ghetto. Through this combined effort, all parties involved hope to make posting videos on the Web more profitable than it has been thus far.

YouTube announced in April that it had struck a deal with Universal Music Group to get Vevo off the ground; since then, Sony Music and EMI have joined the clique, powering Vevo with three of the Big Four major labels at launch. But the site isn't limited to just music videos—it contains various other clips that come straight from the labels themselves, including behind-the-scenes looks and interviews with artists.

Finding artists you like is (unsurprisingly) easy: just use the search box or browse through some of the top artists listed on Vevo's home page. You can also search for songs, though we found that it was easier to find artists with various mini-clips attached (interviews, little ditties, etc.) than it was to find artists with full-blown music videos on their pages. For example, even quintessential EMI artist Norah Jones didn't seem to have any videos at all on her page, leaving us perplexed as to what criteria is being used to put videos on the site.

That said, we did manage to find legit music videos (Mariah Carey seemed to be a popular choice, according to Vevo's homepage), although the behind-the-scenes videos were actually quite a bit more interesting. The idea is the same as Hulu (and to some extent YouTube) in that the videos often come with a pre-roll video ad as well as traditional ads placed around the page. They're generally unobtrusive and the pre-roll ad is short—shorter than some of Hulu's have been as of late, anyway—which we found to be pretty tolerable.

Watching a video is the same as on YouTube or Hulu—you can pop it out to fullscreen, pause, get links to share with friends, and even embed full videos with some easy-to-find embed code.

(Yes, we are going to torture you with Lady Gaga all throughout this post.)

There are a few neat little details included on many (but not all) artist pages, like links to their own websites and Twitter updates that have been ported into the site. This is true even for some artists without music videos, giving the pages a bit more personal flavor.

The downsides, aside from those mentioned above, include serious launch-day blues—the site was exceptionally slow for us for many hours and often threw back Internal Server Errors. Sometimes, because of server overload, it would pretend to load an artist's page but not populate it with anything. These are all issues that aren't particularly shocking at the launch of any website and we don't expect them to persist over the life of Vevo, but it's still annoying for users trying to check it out. One would think that YouTube's experience would help Vevo handle the traffic spike a little better, but perhaps not.

We have high hopes for Vevo, as it offers a free outlet for the kind of content that the record labels have not been very willing to leave on YouTube. The site does face serious competition from MTV Music, a site with exactly the same goal but with (seemingly) way more music videos. Launched in October of 2008, MTV has quite a head start on Vevo in terms of uploading its entire library of content, plus it still offers the same perks, like extra clips. If I were hunting for a music video that I couldn't find on YouTube first, I might go to MTV Music first before Vevo due to content selection.

The caveat, however, is that YouTube heavily promotes Vevo on its own site when you perform searches for specific artists—an important move that will keep it from being forgotten by the YouTube-using masses. For example, Lady Gaga's official YouTube channel now includes videos almost exclusively from Vevo, showing that YouTube and the record companies have not forgotten to actively woo YouTube's loyal audience. It's for this reason alone that Vevo might actually succeed—otherwise, it would just be Yet Another Video Site On the Internet�.

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui